Sunday, 3 May 2015

3rd May

Royal Festival Hall in 2011

Today in 1951, the Festival of Britain got under way with
the opening of the Royal Festival Hall.

Organised as a celebration of the nation’s recovery after
the 2nd World War, the Festival was organised to help promote the
British contribution to science, technology, industrial design, architecture
and the arts. It was held throughout the country with its centrepiece based on
the South Bank of the River Thames in London.

The Festival was very much associated with the Clement Atlee
headed Labour government elected in 1945, whilst being vehemently opposed to by
the Conservative opposition. Indeed Winston Churchill referred to the
forthcoming Festival of Britain as "three-dimensional Socialist propaganda"
and upon the return of a Conservative administration in October 1951, his first
act was to instruct the clearance of the South Bank site (all bar the Royal
Festival Hall which is now Grade 1 listed and still stands proudly to this
day).

The Skylon

The symbol of the Festival was a strange looking, cigar
shaped, aluminium-clad steel structure, supported by cables called the Skylon. It
towered up to 90 metres in height and gave the impression of floating above the
ground. A popular quip at the time compared it to the British economy that
supposedly “had no visible means of support!”

Irrespective of its popularity with the British public, the
cost of dismantling and re-erecting the Skylon elsewhere was deemed too expensive
by Churchill and so it was also demolished and sold for scrap (after being
toppled into the river).